VALKYRIE

Ask a price guide for Valkyrie's first appearance and it will send you to The Avengers Vol. 1 #83 (1970). The honest answer is stranger. Brunnhilde had already appeared four years earlier, in Thor Vol. 1 #133 (October 1966) — in the issue's "Tales of Asgard" backup, where Stan Lee and Jack Kirby send the Valkyries to do their ancient work over the dying barbarian Harokin. She is right there in the story, spear in hand — and nobody, in or out of it, ever says her name. The Marvel Database's index of that story lists her, with all the fanfare she got, as "Brunnhilda (Unnamed)."

The debut everybody cites belongs to somebody else. In Avengers #83, a Valkyrie storms in, recruits the Scarlet Witch, the Wasp, Black Widow and Medusa as the Lady Liberators, and leads them against the male Avengers — then stands revealed as Amora the Enchantress wearing Brunnhilde's face, working a scheme to recover the power Odin had stripped from her. Roy Thomas, who created that Valkyrie with John Buscema, said plainly that he wanted "a sort of female Thor" — and that at first she was simply an Enchantress disguise.

Brunnhilde herself took two more tries to arrive. The Enchantress next planted the persona in mortal Samantha Parrington to menace the Hulk in The Incredible Hulk Vol. 1 #142 (1971); then, in The Defenders Vol. 1 #4 (1973), Steve Englehart and Sal Buscema finally placed Brunnhilde's essence into Barbara Norriss, a mortal driven mad in the sorceress Casiolena's dungeon, as the price of a jailbreak. The swap ran both ways — Norriss's own essence was left trapped in Brunnhilde's true body back in Asgard — and the two women did not come face to face over it until Defenders Vol. 1 #66 (1978).